the notion of "free development of all producers", distancing themselves from "the attenuated, reformist aims of social democracy and the productivist structures of the bureaucratic variations of socialism", such as forms of Leninism and Stalinism. They grounded the failure of past socialist movements in "underdevelopment in the context of hostility by existing capitalist powers", which led to "the denial of internal democracy" and "emulation of capitalist productivism". Kovel believed that the forms of "actually existing socialism" consisted of "public ownership of the means of production", rather than meeting "the true definition" of socialism as "a free association of producers", with the party–state bureaucracy acting as the "alienating substitute 'public'". In analysing the Russian Revolution, Kovel felt that "conspiratorial" revolutionary movements "cut off from the development of society" will "find society an inert mass requiring leadership from above". From this, he commented that the anti-democratic Tsarist heritage meant that the Bolsheviks, who were aided into power by World War One, were a minority who, when faced with a counter-revolution and invading Western powers, continued "the extraordinary needs of 'war communism'", which "put the seal of authoritarianism" on the revolution; for Kovel, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky "resorted to terror", shut down the soviets (workers' councils), and emulated "capitalist efficiency and productivism as a means of survival", setting the stage for Stalinism. In Kovel's eyes, Lenin came to oppose the nascent Bolshevik environmentalism and its champion Aleksandr Bogdanov, who was later attacked for "idealism"; Kovel described Lenin's philosophy as "a sharply dualistic materialism, rather similar to the Cartesian separation of matter and consciousness, and perfectly tooled ... to the active working over of the dead, dull matter by the human hand", which led him to want to overcome Russian backwardness through rapid industrialization. According to Rovel, this tendency was augmented by a desire to catch-up with the West and the "severe crisis" of the revolution's first years. Furthermore, Kovel quoted Trotsky, who believed in a communist "superman" who would "learn how to move rivers and mountains". Kovel believes that, in Joseph Stalin's "revolution from above" and mass terror in response to the early 1930s economic crisis, Trotsky's writings "were given official imprimatur", despite the fact that Trotsky himself was eventually purged, as Stalinism attacked "the very notion of ecology ... in addition to ecologies". Kovel added that Stalin "would win the gold medal for enmity to nature", and that, in the face